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Attendees to the renowned gallery are familiar to unexpected displays in its expansive Turbine Hall. They've basked under an simulated sun, slid down helter skelters, and witnessed automated jellyfish drifting through the air. Yet this marks the initial time they will be engaging themselves in the detailed nasal chambers of a reindeer. The current creative installation for this cavernous space—designed by Native Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—welcomes patrons into a winding design inspired by the scaled-up interior of a reindeer's nose airways. Once inside, they can stroll around or chill out on reindeer hides, listening on headphones to tribal seniors sharing stories and wisdom.

The Significance of the Nose

Why the nose? It could appear playful, but the artwork pays tribute to a little-known scientific wonder: scientists have found that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can heat the surrounding air it takes in by eighty degrees, allowing the animal to thrive in harsh Arctic temperatures. Enlarging the nose to larger than human size, Sara notes, "produces a perception of insignificance that you as a human being are not dominant over nature." Sara is a former journalist, children's author, and rights advocate, who hails from a reindeer-herding family in the Norwegian Arctic. "Perhaps that creates the potential to alter your outlook or evoke some humility," she states.

An Homage to Traditional Ways

The winding structure is part of a elements in Sara's absorbing art project celebrating the culture, science, and philosophy of the Sámi, the continent's original inhabitants. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi count roughly 100,000 people spread across the Norwegian north, the Finnish Arctic, Sweden, and the Russian Arctic (an region they call Sápmi). They've endured oppression, integration policies, and eradication of their dialect by all four countries. By focusing on the reindeer, an animal at the heart of the Sámi mythology and origin tale, the work also spotlights the group's issues relating to the climate crisis, land dispossession, and external control.

Metaphor in Elements

Along the long entrance incline, there's a towering, 26-meter structure of pelts ensnared by electrical wires. It serves as a metaphor for the societal frameworks restricting the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part spiritual ascent, this component of the exhibit, called Goavve-, relates to the Sámi term for an extreme weather phenomenon, whereby thick sheets of ice appear as varying conditions liquefy and solidify again the snow, trapping the reindeers' primary cold-season sustenance, fungus. Goavvi is a result of climate change, which is occurring up to much more rapidly in the Arctic than elsewhere.

Three years ago, I met with Sara in a remote town during a goavvi winter and accompanied Sámi reindeer keepers on their motorized sleds in freezing temperatures as they hauled containers of supplementary feed on to the exposed tundra to provide manually. The herd gathered round us, pawing the icy ground in vain attempts for lichen-covered bits. This costly and demanding process is having a significant impact on reindeer husbandry—and on the animals' self-sufficiency. Yet the other option is starvation. As these icy periods become commonplace, reindeer are perishing—a number from hunger, others drowning after falling into lakes and rivers through unstable frozen surfaces. On one level, the work is a monument to them. "Through the stacking of components, in a way I'm transporting the goavvi to London," says Sara.

Diverging Belief Systems

This artwork also emphasizes the clear difference between the industrial view of power as a commodity to be utilized for profit and livelihood and the Sámi outlook of vitality as an inherent life force in creatures, individuals, and nature. This venue's past as a coal and oil power station is linked with this, as is what the Sámi view as environmental exploitation by Scandinavian states. In their efforts to be leaders for sustainable power, these states have locked horns with the Sámi over the development of turbine fields, water power facilities, and mines on their native soil; the Sámi contend their human rights, ways of life, and way of life are endangered. "It's challenging being such a limited population to protect your rights when the justifications are rooted in environmental protection," Sara notes. "Extractivism has appropriated the rhetoric of environmentalism, but still it's just attempting to find more suitable ways to continue practices of consumption."

Personal Challenges

She and her relatives have themselves clashed with the Norwegian government over its tightening regulations on animal husbandry. Previously, Sara's sibling embarked on a sequence of finally failed legal cases over the required reduction of his livestock, apparently to stop excessive feeding. To back him, Sara created a four-year set of pieces called Pile O'Sápmi comprising a huge drape of 400 cranial remains, which was exhibited at the 2017's event Documenta 14 and later purchased by the National Museum of Oslo, where it resides in the lobby.

The Role of Art in Awareness

For many Sámi, visual expression appears the exclusive sphere in which they can be understood by outsiders. In 2022, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|